<p>What! i read somewhere that you don't loose point for leaving a question blank and loose .25 point if you guessed wrong.</p>
<p>So should i guess if i can eliminate 3 answers</p>
<p>Well, that model is based on saying everyone starts out with a 0 and works their way up to an 800.</p>
<p>What we're saying is...if you answered EVERY question right, you would have an 800. Every question you leave blank takes away from that, and every question you answer incorrectly takes away from that. The former takes away 1 raw point, and the latter takes away 1.25 raw points.</p>
<p>oh!! got it so when should i guess?</p>
<p>when the odds are in your favor.
if you eliminate 1 answer choice, guess</p>
<p>If you only guess for 3 questions, even if you get them all wrong, it still counts as leaving them blank because the score is rounded up.
So if you guess on 3 and get all wrong, you have
-3.75 ROUNDED UP to -3 which is the same as leaving them all blank.</p>
<p>So, if you're really only hesitating on a couple of questions GUESS because omitting is the same as getting them all wrong but you will have the possiblity of getting them right (or at least one of them).</p>
<p>Hmmm...I hope I made sense.</p>
<p>I agree with ahntimmy and bsDBer2010! You invest 0.25 to, maybe, gain 1(.25).. </p>
<p>It's kinda like the prisoners dilemma, in a way.. You know, when to prisoners rat on each other, they both go to jail for 5 years; if only one does it, he goes free, the other 10 years; if they both don't rat, the'll go behind bars for 2 years. Actually, it's pretty much exactly the same! (Oke, that was a very vague explanation! Look it up on wikipedia or something haha)</p>
<p>rainbsprinkles, I think your analysis is correct when applied to 2 questions, but not when applied to 3. If you guess 2 wrong, you have -2.50, and that's rounded to make only -2. But if you guess 3 wrong, I'm pretty sure that -3.75 becomes -4. So the first two guesses are essentially "free" and could really benefit you, but the third one is a problem. Of course, that's assuming that you're right about the questions you're "sure of."</p>
<p>QuantMech, your scores are rounded up no matter what, not only if the decimal >.5</p>
<p>Let's say there are 50 questions and you're sure of all 47 answers. That leaves you with 3 questions that you can't answer. If you answer none of them, you still get 47.
If you answer all 3 of them, and get all three of them wrong, your raw score is 46.25 which gets automatically rounded up to 47. If you get two wrong, your raw score is 47.5, rounded up to 48. If you get one wrong, your raw scores is 47.75, rounded up to 48.
So, if you only guess on 3 questions then you should be all right.</p>
<p>No, rainbsprinkles, the College Board document at
<a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/satguide/SAT_score_0405.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/sat/satguide/SAT_score_0405.pdf</a>
indicates that you should round to the nearest whole number. So 46.25 is rounded to 46, not 47. You round up when you have a score of n.5. </p>
<p>The only place I know where 46.25 is rounded to the next higher number is on US Income Tax forms, when it would increase the tax you owe.</p>
<p>Also, if you get one out of 50 wrong, your raw score is 48.75, and it gets rounded to 49. Two wrong rounds to 48. Three wrong rounds to 46.</p>
<p>yes, quantmech is correct. The collegeboard being slightly more academic than the u.s. gov't uses proper rules of rounding</p>
<p>even ONE that you guessed on that you would have gotten as a blank would forgive 4 bad guesses...but most likely you would guess more correctly than 1 in 5.
^ is the argument the collegeboard gives...</p>
<p>HOWEVER if you suck as a guesser (which is why I said you should keep track in your practice tests), maybe you'll get less than 1 per 5 correct...lol :P I doubt it</p>
<p>Whoa, I feel so stupid now. I never really undestood why CB would be so nice :-P</p>
<p>Shows what happens when you skim!</p>